


Lunar Blues

by stilitana



Series: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral [3]
Category: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - Harlan Ellison
Genre: Body Image, Complicated Relationships, Gen, Identity Issues, Melancholy, Mental Health Issues, Recovery, all kinds of issues really, i'll add as i go on i have no idea what to tag this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-28
Packaged: 2019-11-06 09:53:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17937569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stilitana/pseuds/stilitana
Summary: AM's erstwhile captives enjoy rest and relaxation at the Lunar Resort and Spa, and totally don't have to worry about the resulting baggage of 109+ years of torment, moon politics, cohabiting with one of AM's creators, and certainly not any stubbornly immortal allied mastercomputers.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Well hello lads, I took a break to focus on school/family/other writing projects, but now I'm emotionally recharged and ready to tackle...whatever this is. Thanks so much for all the support and kind words, it means a lot to me. As always feel free to find me on tumblr @stilitana, and to leave critique if you'd like. Thanks so much for reading, I hope you enjoy.

I

            When I remember myself enough to speak, (I don’t know when,) I ask one of the machine-people where I am. They all wear white from top to bottom, they have dark visors or screens over their faces. He, she, or it says, Quarantine.

            Quarantine. It’s an answer rich in information – I can spend a long time thinking about its implications. From one word I can jump to all kinds of engaging conclusions – I’m sick, dreadfully sick, contagiously so. There was a medical dictionary somewhere, I used to flip through it. Neurasthenia, paresis, ankylosing spondylitis. These are words like wishbones, you can pull them apart. Prefix, root word, suffix. Gut and debone them like a fish.

            Tests are run. I go in and out. Subject unresponsive to verbal stimuli, to light or pressure, to pain of sternal rub. There are a number of tubes in a number of places.

            I think for a long time I don’t notice anything has changed. The world is blunted and muffled, my senses are dull, they take a while to start sluggishly processing the smell of antiseptic and some kind of perfume or air freshener, a fir tree smell. There is music sometimes. Old songs. I don’t know when I heard them, but hearing them makes me recall memories that aren’t mine. I do not believe in past lives, someone must be beaming these memories into my head. Someone else heard these songs, I remember them hearing them. Life breaks like a branch and can’t be made whole again. Time used to move forward only, not anymore. Maybe I’m remembering the future. I have before, I think.

 

II

            The room is small and pale. The walls appear beige but I’m sure they’re one-way mirrors. At one point I was in a different room, or the wall was transparent, I could see people looking in, not anymore.

            The door hisses when it opens, plastic rustles as someone steps through the flaps. Briefly I glimpse the passage beyond, a tunnel in which a white mist swirls. It looks like a spaceship. That is a game somebody used to play in cardboard boxes with Magic Markers.

            She stands in front of the closed door. The sight of her face – I don’t have the words. My heart or gut recognizes her as human immediately, it takes my mind longer. For a moment I feel like I’m falling backwards, she is uncanny and terrifying. Then the room settles, her face settles, my mind comes to terms with her. She doesn’t wear the white hazard suit the others have, just this plain white pantsuit get-up. She holds a tablet in her hands. Very sleek, very shiny black hair pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck. I want to touch it.

            “May I come in?” she says.

            She already is. I don’t know how to answer, I get nervous, is it a riddle or a test? It’s not as if I could stop her, I don’t pretend to have a say in what goes on here. I shrug.

            She sits on the round plastic chair by the wall and faces me. I’m sitting on the bed. I used to not be able to, there were straps and sedatives, I don’t remember when they went away or how.

            “My name is Lily.” She pauses. I don’t know what she wants. I can’t meet her eyes for very long, I look down and away, clear my throat.

            “Do you remember me?” she asks.

            I look at her. “Should I?”

            “We haven’t met in person. It would be understandable, if you’ve forgotten. How are you feeling?”

            I don’t know. “Ok.”

            “I’d like to ask you some questions.”

            “Ok.”

            “What’s your name?”

            “Ted.”

            “And where are we right now?”

            “I don’t know,” I say, and only realize that’s the truth as I say it. My fingers grip the sheets. Not very tightly. I have trouble sometimes, I can’t make a fist easily.

            Lily nods. “That’s ok.”

            “Where are we?”

            “The lunar colony.”

            “The moon?”

            “Yes.”

            I take a moment to think about that. I don’t feel much either way. I look at the white sheet on the bed, the gray, thin material of my clothes. “Was I supposed to know that?”

            “There is no ‘supposed.’ Don’t worry too much about your answers, I’m just getting a sense of things.”

            “We’ve done this before. You’ve told me that before.”

            “Yes.”

            “How many times?”

            “This is the thirteenth. I’m now going to ask you to repeat back to me three words. We’ll wait a moment before you repeat them. I’ll tell you when. The words are bottle, garage, velvet.”

            We wait in silence. She looks at her tablet, I examine the backs of my hands. The skin is pale and very faintly mottled with pink. I don’t think it was always like that. I don’t think it always was one way or another.

            I repeat her words back to her, relieved when they don’t mutate in my throat and come out garbled.

            “Good job. Now I’d like you to count backwards from one-hundred, by sevens.”

            I do so, not very quickly, I have to subtract ten and add three each time, I double-check, but I don’t know that this is necessarily any differently than I would have done it before I caught whatever it is that has me quarantined. I spell ‘world’ and ‘black’ backwards for her. She asks me to name the door, her wristwatch.

            “Very good. In which state did you grow up?”

            I hesitate. Somebody grew up somewhere, but the continuity isn’t there – cause and effect dance circles around each other, I might have dropped out of the sky into this moment, someone put the past into a box and shook it up. It broke and scrambled.

            “Arkansas.”

            It came to mind first. She makes a note.

            “Now could you touch your right thumb to your ear, and stick out your tongue.”

            “You aren’t teasing, are you?”

            “No.”

            I do as she says. I find the ear by sliding my fingers down the side of the head until I feel it. There is a certain lack of bodily sensation or awareness of its topography. Sometimes its form surprises me. The abruptness of its boundaries, how it ends at the fingertips.

            She hands me her tablet, does not let go until she sees I’ve got a firm grip on it.

            “I’d like you to write a sentence on the top line, please.”

            “Any sentence?”

            “Anything you want.”

            I take the stylus in a loose, awkward grip. The handwriting is atrocious. _He writes a sentence,_ it says. Postscript, if I cared enough to add it: _he tries._

            “Beneath that, on the screen you will see an image. Try to replicate that image below.”

            There are two intersecting pentagons on the screen. I sigh and make my clumsy copy.

            She takes her tablet back and says, “I’m going to name three things, and I’d like you to tell me what they have in common. Rabbit, antelope, trout.”

            “All are extinct.”

            “Well, that’s not wrong,” she says, and then looks down and brushes her hand across her forehead as though tucking hair behind her ear – a nervous gesture. “I mean – yes.”

            “We’ve done this before, but you said we haven’t met in person.”

            “I’m sorry. We have. I didn’t want to upset or frighten you. We’re confident the memory loss will lessen in time. You’re already making great progress.”

            “Where did we first meet?”

            “I’m happy to answer questions – but we’re almost done. Could you wait, do one more task, and then ask me anything? Does that sound fair?”

            “Ok.”

            “You find a stamped letter on the sidewalk.”

            “I do?”

            “This is a scenario. Pretend you find a stamped letter on the sidewalk. What do you do?”

            I blink a few times, as if that will reboot my brain. “What do I do?”

            “With the letter, once you find it.”

            “I pick it up.”

            “And then?”

            “I read whatever’s on the back of it. The name and address.”

            “And?”

            “Do I recognize them?”

            “No, you don’t.”

            “I open the letter.”

            Lily nods and makes a note. I don’t like her suddenly. She’s smug and aloof.

            “Now you’ll answer me?”

            “Yes.”

            “Where did we meet?”

            “You were on Earth. You saw me on a screen.”

            “Why?”

            “Why were you on Earth, or why was I on a screen?”

            “Both. Either.”

            “It’s very complicated. The answers are variable.”

            “You said you’d answer me.”

            “How much do you remember?”

            “The Earth was destroyed.”

            “Yes. But you survived. You and four others.”

            “Where are the others?”

            “They’re here, they’re safe.”

            “Why aren’t they in here with me? Are they quarantined, too?”

            “Who told you that you were being quarantined?”

            “I don’t know. The others wear masks. Aren’t I? Aren’t I sick? What’s wrong with me?”

            “You aren’t sick. You’ve been unwell, but you’re receiving the best care we can offer. You’re getting better. You’re already much better.”

            “Where are the others?”

            “They’ve been here longer. They’re at different stages of recovery. You’ll get there, too.”

            “How much longer have they been here?”

            “Just shy of a year.”

            “Oh.”

            “Does that bother you?”

            “Should it?”

            “There is no right or wrong answer. It either does or it doesn’t.”

            “Did I pass your test?”

            “You did well. It isn’t a pass or fail kind of test. The results just help me map your progress, cognitively. You did very well.”

            “When can I see them?”

            “Very soon. It’s complicated, Ted. We’re just being cautious. We don’t want to set anyone back.”

            “Why would that set us back? Don’t they get to see each other?”

            “It’s not a personal judgement. They’ve had longer to recover. You’re nearly there.”

            “How long have I been here?”

            “Two months, as of yesterday.”

            “I don’t remember. Two whole months?”

            “You were unwell, Ted. You were often sedated. Like I said, you’re doing much better now.”

            “We’re on the moon. I am.”

            “Yes.”

            I smile. I don’t feel anything. My head is foggy. I think whatever drugs they’ve given me keep me from feeling much. But there’s a flicker, now. I smile. “Then AM is dead.”

            “You remember it?”

            I grit my teeth. I look up at her, can’t bear it, then scowl down at my knees. Or try to. I don’t know, I have what I’ve heard called a ‘flat-affect.’

            “I think you remember more than you’re letting on, Ted.”

            “Why do you think that? You think I’m a liar?”

            “No. I think you’re trying to figure out if I am. I’m not here to hurt you, Ted. You can trust me.”

            I shrug. “Then let me see them. Give a straight answer. I want to see them. Until I do, I won’t believe you that they’re here.”

            “I have a favorable report to give. Very soon, Ted. Maybe even tomorrow.”

            “Why the wait?”

            “If you remember as much as I suspect you do, then you must understand how delicate this situation is.”

            I grip the sheet as tight as I can. My eyes water but I don’t let myself blink, I want to feel them stinging. “Why would seeing me set them back?”

            “We’re just being cautious. You’re all safe now. There’s no rush.”

            “God, just _say it._ I’m fucking tired of it, I can’t take it, just say it.”

            “Say what?”

            I laugh. There’s no feeling in it, it’s an inhuman, dry sound. “They don’t want to. They hate me. They wish you’d left me down there. They don’t want to see me, but I need to – no, I don’t, be quiet, I don’t. Don’t lie to me. I already knew.”

            “Ted, please try to breathe evenly. Breathe with me. Hurting yourself will only further delay my ability to arrange a meeting with the others.”

            My hands are in my hair, pulling it. I relax my grip, put them on my knees. “It doesn’t matter. They’re here. I’m here. So AM is dead. If I am here, then AM is dead. Now I’m done. It’s finished.”

            “I’ll let you rest now,” Lily says, rising from her chair. “Please try to trust us, Ted. We’re helping you. The others do want to see you, and if you continue the good track you’re on, it will happen very soon. They ask about you every day. Not just once, but dozens of times. You don’t have to believe me, yet. You’ll see them soon yourself.”

            “Maybe I don’t want to.”

            “It’s entirely up to you.”

            “AM is gone,” I mutter, rubbing my hands up and down my arms.

            She leaves. There is not much to do in the room. There is a very thin, well-preserved paperback novel called _The Old Man and the Sea._ Someone must have very carefully chosen this novel. I think it was probably hard to find a story whose content would neither insult my intelligence nor send me spiraling into hysteria. I try not to think about who did so. I don’t think about _them_. One year and two months. They are alive, unless Lily is lying, which of course, she probably is. All of them? I can’t know.

            But I am here, so AM is not. There is no other way they could have ripped me from him.

            I think they left some parts behind. I have phantom pangs all over.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I keep asking myself when I'm going to stop writing this but the truth is that it's much too fun to give up. :,)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading I love you!

III

            I dream that I’m performing to a concert hall upholstered in red satin. I am seated at a grand piano. The keys make no sound, not even when I get desperate and bang on them. My hands feel bundled in layers of thick gloves. I can’t move them with any precision, my vision is fuzzy and blacking at the edges. A man’s raised voice bellows somewhere to my left. I don’t dare look up, just keep smacking the piano. It’s raining. Water jumps up from between the keys when I hit them. The man is bald, he comes yelling up the steps on the side of the stage, he is saying _What are you doing, you can’t be here, causing a scene, what were you thinking, just wait until your father gets—_

            I wake up. I lie on my back and breathe raggedly into the dark room. I am sure Lily would love to hear all about that dream, she would have a field day. I may not remember the past with much detail (maybe I could if I wanted to,) but I don’t think there was anything particularly troubled about my relationship with my father. No, it was the usual, I think. Just dream garbage. I never played a piano. I remember touching one only once, I was young, it stood in the lobby of a nice hotel. I pressed the keys. You weren’t supposed to, it had a sign, Do Not Touch. Someone grabbed my wrist and held the sign down low, right in my face, and pointed, said, _Do you see that, young man, can you read what that says?_

            I had burst into tears at once.

 

IV                                                                                              

            The food is bland and textureless. It comes in soft crumbly bricks or else like applesauce. Its hard at first to keep it down. They regulate the portions strictly, which is probably for the best – I’ve had nothing but AM’s cuisine for over a century, and god knows in what shape he left my organs. It would not surprise me if my body turns out to be booby trapped. I keep waiting for it to give out and betray me in some terrible, humiliating way. It would be so very much like AM to have left his signature on me, to make me throw up every time I eat, to make me bruise or bleed at the slightest touch, to have planted some sort of spyware into my head that one day will short-circuit my brain and replace me.

            Of course, there doesn’t need to be any more than there already is. I’m marked already, inside and out. I haven’t seen a mirror. I don’t look at my body if I can help it. In the glimpses I’ve seen, yes I have noticed the discoloration. I look away quickly each time.

            When Lily enters I’m combing my fingers through my hair. I stop when she comes in.

            “Are you ready?” she asks.

            I shrug.

            “If you aren’t, it’s ok. There isn’t any rush. You can tell me, if you want more time, if you’re unsure for any reason.”

            “I want to. I have to see them.”

            “I’m glad. I think it will be good for all of you.”

            I shift my weight back and forth, cross my arms. “Well, you’re the expert.”

            “Do you feel anxious?”

            “No.”

            “If you do, it’s alright.”

            “Can I ask you something?”

            “Yes.”

            “Never mind.”

            “Go ahead, ask.”

            “Do I look ok?”

            “Do you look ok?”

            “That’s what I said.”

            “Why do you ask?”

            “Oh, God, forget it.”

            “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

            “I’m not upset.”

            “I’m just trying to understand where this is coming from.”

            “Now I know you’ve been lying. If you’d talked to the others at all, you’d know I’m disgustingly vain.”

            “You’re very evasive, is what you are.”

            “You’re the psychologist, shouldn’t you know what I’m talking about?”

            “I’m not a mind-reader, Ted.”

            “I mean I’m not – the reason you haven’t had us see each other isn’t that I might – disturb them, or something, is it?”

            “Disturb them how?”

            “Like maybe I’m – not right. Maybe I don’t look right.”

            “Is that how you feel about yourself?”

            “That’s not the point.”

            “I’ll admit my memory may not be the clearest – you understand I was focused on other things, the first time I saw you – but it’s my impression that you look very much as you did then. That is absolutely not why we haven’t had you and the others meet yet, Ted. It really was what we thought was best for everyone’s health. You might not remember, that’s ok, but it was not very long ago that you were catatonic, and after that – not always coherent.”

            By that she must mean the time I spent banging my head against the wall which was really a one-way mirror and accusing them of implanting me with subdermal tracking devices or insisting that the inside of my body was really all wire and metal and they absolutely needed to cut it open and get it all out. Yes, Lily, I remember some of that, between the drugs they kept pumping into me. I just nod.

            “Ok.”

            She tries to keep her face neutral, but I have noticed she tends to slip easily into a sort of crumpled, weak look. I don’t know the trigger, I can guess it’s pity. She moves as if to touch my arm and stops. The only contact I’ve gotten since coming here has been clinical, whatever is required to secure an IV.

            “What are you feeling right now?” she says.

            I stare at her blankly. “Why?”

            “You struck me as apprehensive.”

            There is an awkward formality, a stilted quality to her speech, that suggests a probable distaste for small talk. I wonder (not for the first time) what sort of psychologist she was, before. I don’t think it was talk therapy.

            “I don’t know what gave you that idea.”

            “Are you afraid to see them?”

            Afraid? It’s like being led to the slaughterhouse, Lily. In one sense. In another, it’s very difficult to feel anything at all. I’m not going to feel anything the way I used to ever again, I’m ruined – nothing that happens now can ever rival what has come before. Rate your pain on a scale of one to ten – this is meaningless to me. How could I dare?

            They say we can’t remember what extreme pain feels like, later on, for self-protection. Labor pangs, trauma wounds, broken bones – we remember that we were in pain, but our minds don’t let us feel again what we felt then, in the moment. This remains the case, but the size of the pain is so enormous that its shadow covers everything. There is not one part of me not saturated with it. I can’t escape it, can’t get out of my skin, but I can’t look at it head on either, my mind shuts down when I think about it. Him.

            “I don’t know,” I say.

            “That’s ok. If you aren’t ready, we—”

            “I need to see them.”

            “Ok.” She nods and opens the door by pressing her finger to a pad on the wall. It slides open. “If you begin to feel overwhelmed or fatigued, don’t hesitate to say so, and you can come back to your room. We can take things slowly.”

            “I feel fine.”

            She lets me lead the way down the passage filled with mist.

            “This is just a sterilizing agent,” she says. “Not because we really thought you’d brought pathogens from Earth, we ruled that out quickly. It was more for your safety.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “Your immune system isn’t at its best.”

            “What does that mean? Something’s wrong?”

            I’m not surprised. I’ve been waiting to hear my intestines were put back in knots or my heart’s flipped upside down.

            “You aren’t sick, hopefully it will recover with time, and rest. It’s the stress. You have to understand, there isn’t anything physically going wrong with your body, but the strain it’s been under – you need time.”

            We’ve reached the second door. Lily pauses.

            “Ready?”

            I nod. My mouth has gone dry, my palms feel clammy, my pulse flutters. She opens the door.

 

V

            The computer and I did not speak, we did not have to, our thoughts flowed out from two sources into one stream and then even that distinction went away. The way it hated me before I became it was different – before it was never so personal. To be dissolved in that way into another consciousness, to be burned through by a scouring white light that leaves not one hidden place between the cells, to be known absolutely – this is what I think prophets wanted from God when they wandered into deserts or poured lime into their eyes.

            I can’t help but feel loss. It aches. I’m not big enough anymore to contain myself, I keep searching and searching, the mind is this big empty hall that echoes, I’m calling where are you, and there is no answer, it’s just me in here.

            Once you have been through certain things with someone, once you have seen them vulnerable, once they tell you intimate things, you’re bound up with them forever. This has happened maybe a handful of times – a few before, then with the others, and then with it, AM. I feel myself choking when I think about it, I feel a weight crushing my chest. _No one will ever know you as I have known you,_ it said, and took cruel pleasure in saying so. _This is a kind of marriage._

AM’s sense of humor is maybe what keeps it from losing all sense and destroying itself. It left a band of discolored skin around my left ring finger, a white ropy scar.

            Subtlety was never AM’s forte.


End file.
